Saturday, September 29, 2012

India launches 101st space mission, and looks to Mars

The mission will be carried out without international help,
highlighting the growth and ambition of India's home-grown space
program, which plans to launch a mission to Mars.

By
Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, Correspondent /
September 29, 2012

India's
space program is advancing at a breakneck pace with a goal of reaching
Mars with an unmanned vehicle by 2014. Here, a satellite launch from
earlier in September.

Arun Sankar K/AP/File

Bangalore, India

India marked its 101st space mission today with the launch of its heaviest communications satellite, GSAT-10, from French Guyana.

The satellite, carrying 30 communication transponders and a
navigation payload, is the first of 10 missions slated for the coming
year, a hectic schedule that the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) hopes will have glorious finale in November 2013 with the launch of an orbiter to Mars.
India’s Red Planet mission is to be carried out without international help, highlighting the growth of the agency.

“At the moment, we plan to do it on our own,” said ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan at the agency’s headquarters here last week.

After 50 years and 100 missions, the Indian space program is growing faster than ever. India’s scientists, some NASA-trained,
assembled the country’s first rocket in a village church in the 1960s.
Today, India’s home-grown space program is considered one of the top six
in the world.
In recent years, the mission has expanded its
original development agenda to embrace more commercial and exploratory
interests – though to what extent remains to be seen.

The
government has increased budgets, accelerating the pace of missions and
moving toward more prestigious – and sometimes controversial – projects
throughout the past decade.
“The first 50 missions took 27 years,
the next 50 took place in the last 10 years and the next 58 missions
will happen in the next five years,” said Mr. Radhakrishnan, whle
emphasizing the agency’s “success on a shoestring” story.

ISRO’s budget is barely 7.5 percent the size of NASA, but it has been growing every year since the early 2000s, jumping from $591 million in 2004-05 to $1.3 billion in 2012-2013.

“I
can think of no other major space program in the world that has enjoyed
such a level of sustained annual budgetary growth,” says Asif Siddiqi,
an associate professor of history at Fordham University, who is working on a book on the Indian space program.

The
budget expansion parallels India’s economic growth in the past decade,
notes Mr. Siddiqi. And high-profile successes have also helped boost
government support for ISRO, he says.

For
five decades, ISRO stuck close to founder Vikram Sarabhai’s vision to
reject “the fantasy of competing with economically advanced countries"
to explore the moon and instead use space technology to improve the
lives of ordinary people.

The result: India has built one
of the largest communication satellite systems – used to support
telemedicine and tele-education programs for rural areas – and one of
the world’s best remote sensing systems, which helps with forecasting
the weather and monitoring natural resources, including locating water
sources.

But the agency’s recent forays into space exploration –
including the 2008 Chandrayan 1 lunar probe and proposed missions to the
sun – and reconnaissance satellites is a “fundamental shift” from
Sarabhai’s “space for development” agenda, says Siddiqi.

India’s uncertainty about that shift was evident last month with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s announcement of the Mars
mission, called Mangalyaan (Sanskrit for “To Mars”), which was met with
mixed response. The mission, timed to coincide with the next window
when the planet is closest to earth, is intended to help collect data on
methane sources.

Skeptics question not only the tough deadline, but whether India
should be spending almost $90 million on a scientific mission that comes
amid economic slowdown in India and after the US has already undertaken a similar mission.

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Not everyone has been critical, however. “India is a country which
works on different levels,” says Krishan Lal, president of the Indian National Science Academy.
“On the one hand, we have a space mission, on the other hand a large
number of bullock carts. You can’t, say, remove all the bullock carts,
then move into space. You have to move forward in all
directions.”

Officials
have defended their program: ISRO chief Radhakrishnan pointed out that
of this year’s budget, 55 percent was allocated to space applications
like communication, navigation, and remote sensing, 36 percent to launch
vehicles and just 9 percent to science and exploration missions
including Chandrayan 2 and the Mars orbiter.

Many observers agree
that prestige is partly behind the Mars mission (the announcement was
made when it became clear that the second Moon mission would not keep
its 2013 date and even took the scientific community by surprise). But
they also say there is little evidence India is engaged in a real space
race. China’s space exploration program is far ahead of India’s, especially in manned spaceflight.

“India’s
space program will be driven by its budgets, not by a race with
competitors,” said Dinshaw Mistry, an associate professor of political
science at the University of Cincinnati
specializing in nuclear, missile, and space technology, in an e-mail.
The Mars mission is “relatively cheap,” he notes, “costing no more than
launching a satellite, while a manned mission is an order of magnitude
more expensive and far more risky.”

Less controversial has been
ISRO’s entry into the multibillion dollar international commercial
launch market via Antrix, its commercial arm. India has launched 29
foreign satellites during the past decade, including the simultaneous
launch of the French SPOT 6 and a Japanese microsatellite in September.

But
“India has barely begun to scratch the surface” of the market, says
Susmita Mohanty, founder and CEO of Earth2Orbit, India’s first private
space start-up.

ISRO is still perfecting its Geosynchronous Launch
Vehicle,which is meant for launching telecommunications satellites, but
it has a robust Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle for launching earth
observation satellites, Dr. Mohanty notes. Theoretically ISRO is capable
of building and launching five to six Polar Satellite Launch Vehicles a
year but for the past few years, has launched about two a year, she
says, “most likely because our national priorities precede any
commercial intent.”
To grab a greater chunk of the market, says Mohanty, who has previously worked in the aerospace industry in US and Europe, ISRO would have to “develop a more international outlook” and privatize routine rocket manufacturing.

There are signs that this is already happening. At the recent close of Bangalore's
Space Expo, Radhakrishnan said that ISRO plans to encourage private
participation so that it can focus on research and development. He
suggested that what India needs is a consortium of big space contracting
companies similar to the US.

“We can learn from Europe and America though their situation is different,” he said.

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